Many times on this blog, I have stressed the importance of taking your easy workouts, easy, and doing your hard workouts, hard.  This evening I had a hard workout and I did indeed go hard.  I went much harder than I realized at the time.

My workout was on the bike and after a brief warm up, the main set was fifteen intervals of two minutes big gear work and two minutes high cadence work.  These fifteen intervals were to be done at Zone 2-3 power, depending on how I was feeling.

It turns out, I was feeling quite strong as I started the intervals, so I began at the top of my Zone 3 power level.  I had a full hour of these alternating big gear / high cadence intervals ahead of me, so I wasn’t sure if I could hold this power level, but I sensed that I could.  I think my legs are feeling strong these past few days, because they are not getting fatigued by running, which I cannot do due to my injury.   

Sure enough, after a dozen of the intervals I was still going strong and still holding high Zone 3 power.  With just twelve minutes of hard work left to do, I decided to try upping my power through to the end of the workout.  Surprisingly, my power increased on each interval as I pushed harder.  During the very last high cadence burst, I was pushing into Zone 5 power.  I had a fantastic session.

It was only afterwards, when I sat down at my computer, that I discovered that my workout was really good.  My average power over that 60 minutes of intervals, was the highest I have ever achieved.  I had set a new ‘all-time’, 60 minute power record.

So there it was.  A ‘routine’ hard effort workout, on a Wednesday evening in January, had turned out to be my best one hour effort for power on a bike.  It just goes to show, that doing the work does indeed pay off occasionally.

By the way, I blocked the actual power values in the photo to follow my philosophy that the numbers are mine and comparison to other people’s numbers don’t matter…. sorry !